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Are any crew skills profitable on their own without the GTN in SW:TOR?

I am speaking of both crafting and missions. Are any of the crew skills (in any combination) generally profitable (making more credits than the missions cost) at the highest tier, without selling rewarded/crafted goods on the GTN to other players? How much of a margin can be made this way if your skills are at 400?

(Note: I realize that more credits can be made by crafting in-demand items and selling them with a huge markup, but this question is about avoiding the GTN and selling the results to ordinary vendors.)

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Why do you want to avoid GTN? – svick Jan 23 at 3:51
Gathering has no costs, so it's obviously profitable. I'm just going to edit that out. – Matthew Read Jan 23 at 3:58
@svick Now that I've read Matthew Read's answer, I don't want to avoid the GTN. I was trying to gauge whether it was necessary to use the GTN to make a profit from crew skills. Now that I've read Matthew's answer, this is clearly the case. That is what I was trying to determine with this question. – somequixotic Jan 23 at 14:32

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up vote 3 down vote accepted

Not even close.

Take for example the Treasure Hunting missions Toxic Knowledge and Untouched Ruins, which are the highest yield Grade 6 missions that show up without a mission discovery. Each of these normally returns 2-4 color crystals and 0-2 Lorrdian Gemstones, plus 2 color crystals and 2 Corusca Gems for a crit. (I kept personal stats on these for a while.)

Let's assume a very high (and nonexistent) crit rate of 50%, so we average 1 Corusca gem each time plus about 5 other mats. A Corusca gem is worth about 2x as much so we get the equivalent of 7 basic mats per mission. The sell for ~120 credits each, for 840 credits total. The missions cost more than double that!

I haven't crunched the numbers specifically but crafted goods seem to vendor for less than the cost of their materials.

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What about using Slicing directly for credits? – svick Jan 23 at 3:53
@svick It's closer, but you still lose money without Mission Discoveries. If you skip the missions and just do gathering then it should be better than gathering and selling materials. – Matthew Read Jan 23 at 3:56
I haven't played SWTOR in quite awhile, but I seem to remember crafted items sold for exactly the sum of their components. The right slicing missions also made you a small profit in the long run, once you factored in the crit successes. – Kexlox Jan 23 at 4:09
Slicing anything less than Bountiful lockboxes gives you back less money than the mission cost except on a critical success. Exclusively using Rich yield lockbox missions will net a small profit -- significantly less than what you'd get for spending the same amount of time running around killing mobs and then selling the vendor thrash. – Shadur Jan 23 at 11:06

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